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Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: PART TWO: winning industrial-use of lisp: Re: Norvig's latest paper on Lisp
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From: Erik Naggum
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Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway
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Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2002 19:44:47 GMT
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* Tim Bradshaw
| I can only speak for myself, but I don't think `they' has died out.
That has got to be the only use of a grammatically singular "they" I would
approve of. I mean, I really thought the example I gave would be a clear-
cut clue of precisely what I was objecting to. In the literature, which I
thought it would be clear that I referred with "there is some record", when
"they" is used with non-plural referents, it still remains _grammatically_
plural, except with illiterate use of "they" as grammatically singular, which
some people have indeed done in the past.
| I don't remember it being corrected at that or my subsequent school.
As long as you kept writing "they are" instead of "they is", there would be
little reason to correct it, unless, of course, the mismatch in number would
be garish or highly ambiguous. Suppose you have a co-ed sports team, they
get a new player, and the coach says "You must treat them well."
| I still use `they' like this, and I don't make any particular attempt to
| speak or write in a PC way. I *hate* `he/she', alternating usage or any of
| these spurious things, I accept `Ms' but would prefer people - male or female
| - to use no title if they care. I often say `England' when I mean `Britain'
| which is pretty unfortunate given where I live.
| Agreement goes syntactically, not semantically, so I say `they are' not `they
| is'. This is similar to German `Sie sind' not `Sie ist' as far as I can see.
Precisely. However, what people really mean gets lost when some dirtbag goes
bananas over some supposed mistake you never made, and the art of paying
attention is considered irrelevant compared to the need to bash people's head
in for opinions they do not hold. Trying to rectify such twists of meaning
because some idiot imputes a different meaning to you that everybody believe
is so fucking annoying I think people like James A. Crippen should be beaten.
When they case psychopaths like Thomas Bushnell to crawl out of his cave to
abuse me for something that James A. Crippen invented, I get really steamed.
However, again, precision in a native language appears to be a lost art. One
of the reasons it is so much easier for me than sloppy dimwits to be precise
is that I _have_ had to make a conscious effort to learn languages (with lots
of conflicting pronunciations and usages from people from all over the world
as your English-speaking community, you cannot just mimick whatever people
say around you), and I have studied Norwegian equally hard, mostly because
the "native dialect" where I grew up is so goddamn ugly. I try not to be
sloppy, but when some native jerk uses his own sloppiness to accuse others of
same, I think someone should have their head examined. Goddamn losers.
| PS. I just had an interesting conversation with my partner who pointed out
| another similar usage in my dialect or its ancestors: `it' as a generic third
| person pronoun.
I use that all the time. Some people _are_ its.
| If you call someone's dog `it' then you are being fairly unfriendly - the
| polite thing to do is ask them if it's a he or she, and then use that.
My queen (the supposed correct term for a female cat) goes by "she" when she
is cute and "it" when it does something bad. I do the same for children and
people. Unfriendly or not, unintelligent animal behavior should have a class
of pronouns all to itself. I'm not kidding. I think it is fully proper to
dehumanize idiots by revoking their right to be called by pronouns reserved
for thinking people -- using "he" or "she" means you care enough about them
as human beings (or pets) to want to know their sex, with "it" you could not
care less.
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